Rails 3, 4, 5, 6

1. config/application.rb
2. config/environment.rb before the initialize! call (we don't usually edit this file)
3. The current environment, e.g. environments/production.rb
4. Gems
5. Vendored plugins
6. All initializers in config/initializers/*.rb
7. config/environment.rb after the initialize! call (we don't usually edit this file)
8. Your own code from app

Rails 2

1. Code in config/preinitializer.rb (if it exists)
2. environment.rb, code above the Rails::Initializer.run blo...

The state_machine gem ships with a scope with_state. This scope has some problems in complex queries or scope chains.

Use this instead:

named_scope :having_state, lambda { |*state_or_states|
  state_or_states = Array.wrap(state_or_states).map(&:to_s)
  { :conditions => [ 'articles.state IN (?)', state_or_states ] }
}

If you want a scope with hash options (with the side effects you should know about):

named_scope :having_st...

Update RubyGems and Passenger

Bundler requires Rubygems >= 1.3.6. Run gem update --system if you have an older version.
It also is not compatible with older versions of passenger, so bring that up to date as well (2.2.15 works).

If you installed RubyGems through apt (which you should never do!), you may see a message giving you a hint to use apt to update.
Some people advise to install the 'rubygems-update-1.3.7' gem on Ubuntu systems if you used apt to install RubyGems.
I did that - and lost all...

Sometimes files attain executable-flags that they do not need, e.g. when your Windows VM copies them over a Samba share onto your machine.

From inside your Rails project directory call regularly:

geordi remove-executable-flags

Runs chmod -x on Ruby, HTML, CSS, image, Rake and similar files.

This script is part of our geordi gem on github.

Boolean attributes can now be set by appending "which", "that" or "who" at the end:

Given there is a movie which is awesome
And there is a movie with the name "Sunshine" that is not a comedy
And there is a director who is popular

Instead of "and" you can now also use "but" and commas to join sentences:

Given there is a movie which is awesome, popular and successful but not science fiction
And there is a director with the income "500000" but with the account balance "-30000"

Update with `sudo gem install cucumber_facto...

rjb is a bridge software. It connects Ruby and Java.

You can write regular expressions some different ways, e.g. /regex/ and %r{regex}. For examples, look here.

Remember that it is always a good idea to match a regex visually first.

Characters

Literal Characters

[ ] \ ^ $ . | ? * + ( )

Character Classes

[ae]            matches a and e, e.g. gr[ae]y => grey or gray => but NOT graay or graey
[0-9]  ...

popthis is awesome when used with inaction_mailer.

Setup inaction_mailer

Install the gem:
sudo gem install popthis

Start the server:
popthis tmp/sent_mails/ # e.g. the folder containing the .txt-mails generated by inaction_mailer

Now, configure your mail client as follows:
Server: localhost
Protocol: POP3
Port: 2220
Username: anything
Password: anything

Capybara does not play nice with sites that have some actions protected by SSL, some not. A popular way to implement this in Rails is using the ssl_requirement plugin by DHH, which redirects a requests from HTTP to HTTPS if the requested action requires SSL and vice versa.

Capybara follows the redirect, but seems to forget the changed protocol for the next request. The only hack-free workaround right now is to use URLs in lieu of paths everywhere (links, form actions).

For a hackful fi...

Our awesome collection of rspec helpers (formerly known as "spec_candy.rb") is now available as a gem. It works, it is tested and there will be updates.

Usage

Add rspec_candy to your Gemfile.

Add require 'rspec_candy/helpers' to your spec_helper.rb, after the rspec requires.

List of features

See on GitHub

YARD 0.6 adds the ability to serve documentation for gems as well as the current project with yard server. Just like gem server in RubyGems, you can serve gem docs. The advantage to YARD’s server is that you don’t need to pre-generate the static docs (with a gem install) before running the server. If you installed your gem with --no-rdoc, YARD will just generate it on the fly!

Ruport’s acts_as_reportable module provides support for using ActiveRecord for data collection. You can use it to get a Ruport::Data::Table from an ActiveRecord model. This cheatsheet covers the basic functionality of acts_as_reportable and some common use cases.

Try our Apify gem which solves many problems you will be having.

home_run is an implementation of ruby’s Date/DateTime classes in C, with much better performance (20-200x) than the version in the standard library, while being almost completely compatible.

When you get this while installing the raspell gem:

ERROR:  Error installing raspell:  
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

You need some libraries:

sudo apt-get install libaspell-dev

When you get this error:

No word lists can be found for the language "de".

An aspell dictionary is missing. Install it with

sudo apt-get install aspell-de

A fake filesystem. Use it in your tests.

Ancestry is a gem/plugin that allows the records of a Ruby on Rails ActiveRecord model to be organised as a tree structure (or hierarchy). It uses a single, intuitively formatted database column, using a variation on the materialised path pattern. It exposes all the standard tree structure relations (ancestors, parent, root, children, siblings, descendants) and all of them can be fetched in a single sql query. Additional features are STI support, named_scopes, depth caching, depth constraints, easy migration from older plugins/gems, integrit...

We built cucumber_spinner to have a progress bar for Cucumber features, which also outputs failing scenarios as soon as they fail.

Installation

gem install cucumber_spinner

Usage

cucumber --format CucumberSpinner::ProgressBarFormatter

If you use CucumberSpinner::CuriousProgressBarFormatter and a feature fails, the according page will show up in your browser.

Note that if you run your Cucumber tests using the [cuc](https://makandracards.com/makandra/1277-a-nicer-way-to-...

To test concurrent code, you will need to run multiple threads. Unfortunately, when you use blocking system calls (e.g. locks on the database), Ruby 1.8 threads won't work because system calls will block the whole interpreter.

Luckily you can use processes instead. fork spins off a new process, IO.pipe sends messages between processes, Process.exit! kills the current process. You will need to take care of ActiveRecord database connections.

Here is a full-fledged example:

describe Lock, '.acquire' do

  before :each do
  ...

rspec_spinner is a progress bar for RSpec which outputs failing examples as they happen (instead of all at the end).

Installation

gem install rspec_spinner

Usage

script/spec -r rspec_spinner -f RspecSpinner::Bar -c

To make a shortcut in your .bashrc

alias ss='script/spec -r rspec_spinner -f RspecSpinner::Bar -c'

There's also an alternate runner RSpecSpinner::Spinner which shows a spinner and the name of the current spec instead of a progress bar.

Install gem and plugin

sudo gem install parallel
script/plugin install git://github.com/grosser/parallel_tests.git

Adapt config/database.yml

test:
  database: xxx_test<%= ENV['TEST_ENV_NUMBER'] %>

Create test databases

script/dbconsole -p
CREATE DATABASE `xxx_test2`;
...

Generate RSpec files

script/generate rspec

(you'll probably only let it overwrite files in script/)

Prepare test databases...